Janina Bauman was a year older than Anne Frank when the Second World War began but, unlike The Diary of Anne Frank, this is a story of survival. When Hitler's decree forced her family into the Warsaw Ghetto, Janina, an intelligent, lively girl, suddenly found herself in a cramped flat, hiding with other Jewish families. At first even curfews and the casual cruelty meted out by the German occupiers could not dim her passion for books, boys and romance. Then came the raids, and Janina, with her sister and mother, had to keep on the move, hiding in the ruins of the ghetto to avoid being one of thousands rounded up every day and deported to the camps. Their escape to the 'Aryan' side was followed by two years in hiding, taking shelter with those willing to help them and living in constant fear of betrayal. Told through her teenage diaries, giving her story a rare immediacy, this is the extraordinary tale of a passionate young woman's courage and survival.

"What do Zoey and Billy Traister do when they find an abandoned ventriloquist dummy in an empty lot? They take him home, of course! As the pair tries to figure out why someone would throw out a perfectly good dummy, they accidentally bring Slappy to life. A night of horror ensues until the siblings put Slappy back into his case. But when they find Slappy's diary and clues that could lead to gold, they'll have to find Slappy's second diary while evading the evil dummy and other terrors."--

"In the evening I had to prepare food and cook supper, which exhausted me totally. In politics there's absolutely nothing new. Again, out of impatience I feel myself beginning to fall into melancholy. There is really no way out of this for us." This is Dawid Sierakowiak's final diary entry. Soon after writing it, the young author died of tuberculosis, exhaustion, and starvation--the Holocaust syndrome known as "ghetto disease." After the liberation of the Lodz Ghetto, his notebooks were found stacked on a cookstove, ready to be burned for heat. Young Sierakowiak was one of more than 60,000 Jews who perished in that notorious urban slave camp, a man-made hell which was the longest surviving concentration of Jews in Nazi Europe.The diary comprises a remarkable legacy left to humanity by its teenage author. It is one of the most fastidiously detailed accounts ever rendered of modern life in human bondage. Off mountain climbing and studying in southern Poland during the summer of 1939, Dawid begins his diary with a heady enthusiasm to experience life, learn languages, and read great literature. He returns home under the quickly gathering clouds of war. Abruptly Lodz is occupied by the Nazis, and the Sierakowiak family is among the city's 200,000 Jews who are soon forced into a sealed ghetto, completely cut off from the outside world. With intimate, undefended prose, the diary's young author begins to describe the relentless horror of their predicament: his daily struggle to obtain food to survive; trying to make reason out of a world gone mad; coping with the plagues of death and deportation. Repeatedly he rallies himself against fear and pessimism, fighting the cold, disease, and exhaustion which finally consume him. Physical pain and emotional woe hold him constantly at the edge of endurance. Hunger tears Dawid's family apart, turning his father into a thief who steals bread from his wife and children.The wonder of the diary is that every bit of hardship yields wisdom from Dawid's remarkable intellect. Reading it, you become a prisoner with him in the ghetto, and with discomfiting intimacy you begin to experience the incredible process by which the vast majority of the Jews of Europe were annihilated in World War II. Significantly, the youth has no doubt about the consequence of deportation out of the ghetto: "Deportation into lard," he calls it. A committed communist and the unit leader of an underground organization, he crusades for more food for the ghetto's school children. But when invited to pledge his life to a suicide resistance squad, he writes that he cannot become a "professional revolutionary." He owes his strength and life to the care of his family.

Lost for sixty years in a Prague attic, the secret diary of a fourteen-year-old prodigy who later died at Auschwitz describes with keen insight into Jewish life the increasing horror of his situation but also reveals a brilliant, droll teenager with a hunger for life.

"Here is the extraordinary Diary of Rywka Lipszyc, finally published 70 years after it was created. Handwritten in a school notebook between October 1943 and April 1944, this remarkable diary depicts the nightmare of life under the Nazis in Poland's infamous Lodz ghetto--through the eyes of brilliant, 14-year-old Jewish girl"--Dust jacket flap.

"In August 1934, without warning or explanation, Wilhelm Reich was expelled from the International Psychoanalytic Association. Political expediency and the organization's growing adherence to Freud's death instinct theory had prevailed over Reich's scientific efforts to understand the functioning of what Freud had termed "libido."" "The provocative originality of Reich's work in the years to follow would inevitably distance him from Freudian psychology. But the result was an extraordinary widening of his scientific interests, scrupulously documented in these journals and letters. They record his pioneering laboratory experiments to verify the reality of the pleasure function and his discovery of an unknown energy that exists in all living matter. They record, too, the anguish of a man unafraid to speak his truth in the face of attack and defamation, even though it cost him his profession, his homeland and his adopted country, his wife, his two children, and his lover." "In her introduction to the volume, Mary Boyd Higgins of the Wilhelm Reich Infant Trust considers key events and themes of Reich's life and work during the years leading up to 1934."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved